1. Field of Invention
The present invention is directed to a low-profile right angle electrical connector assembly having six board-mount connectors that allow for the right angle connection of cable connectors to a low profile Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (“PCIe”) card such that the assembly has a total of 48 differential pairs of signal contacts capable of carrying multi-gigabit per second serial bus signals (such as HyperTransport® and/or PCIe Gen-III) with high signal fidelity. In some embodiments, each cable connector includes a replaceable latch that helps secure the cable connectors relative to the board-mount connectors.
2. Description of Related Art
Traditional low-profile PCIe card connector assemblies only contain four board-mount connectors because the connectors are too large to allow six connectors to fit in the space required by the PCIe specification. Even with eight differential pairs per connector, these other connector assemblies would only have a total of thirty-two differential pairs, which means that each connector assembly would have a maximum of 16 lanes PHY per low-profile PCIe form factor card. These traditional connector assemblies result in undesirable latency (i.e., reduction in the speed and processing of data) and cannot be used to create complex topologies like 3D Torus or Flat Butterfly networks because these multidimensional network topologies need 24 lanes of signals, i.e. a total of 48 differential pairs of signal contacts. 3D Torus networks and other multidimensional topologies allow for energy-proportional computing and enable a reduction of the server's interconnection energy consumption of approximately one-fourth of the consumption of the traditional switched networks. Considering that most modern servers used in datacenters are designed to accommodate only low-profile PCIe cards, using standard connectors would not enable the realization of the type of power reduction and efficiency improvements afforded by low-profile PCIe with a total of 48 differential pairs of signal contacts.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a PCIe card assembly with an increased number of board-mount connectors that allow for the secure right angle connection to a corresponding number of cable connectors while maintaining signal fidelity and meeting the low-profile PCIe card requirements.